A little Update

It has been a while since I last wrote an update on all the happenings of my life here at school. I am nearing the end of my time here in Yorktown. I will be going into week nine of training, and I only have four more to go. Yesterday I took my final test, which covered everything we had learned thus far...so now I am all done with the classroom portion of my training. Now we will be going out on the small boats putting everything we have been learning about navigation into practice. I am excited that we get to do the practical part of training now…no more long days in the classroom!!!


I received my orders this week to my next duty station. I will be going to Station Eastport, Maine. Eastport is the east-most city of the United States. It is a very small town…the kind of towns where everybody knows what you are doing before you do! I hear it is beautiful country though, and I will be enjoying lots of snow!!! I know this is where God wants me to go. I am a slave of the Lord Jesus and I want to serve Him with all my heart, enthusiastically.

So I pray and commit this new chapter in my life to the Lord and I am excited to see all that God shall do. I am excited to see God’s name glorified. And that is what I want to do---GLORIFY THE LORD!!!

I am so blessed…God continues to strengthen my heart and fill me with joy in Jesus Christ. My life is His and I surrender to His plan joyfully. I love Him with all my heart; He is everything to me! So I press on today in the strength of the Lord, rejoicing in my God and Savior, and so very happy to be the slave of Christ.

Living In Light of Our LIVING HOPE

Living In Light of Our LIVING HOPE




I read in 1 Peter this evening and I want to share a verse from chapter one: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a LIVING HOPE through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). After I read that verse, my heart just wants to explode with joy! I am so amazed by God’s amazing, endless and incomprehensible GRACE!

Every day of my life is transformed by God’s grace, which He has given me because of Jesus Christ. I do not deserve it at all, but He gives it to me anyway. He bestows mercy when all I deserve is wrath; He lavishes His love on me, when all I deserve is His hatred; He blesses me beyond my imagination, when I was His enemy. Jesus Christ has ransomed my soul, and so I sing and rejoice in the Almighty God who is the Living God. He is mighty to save!!! He is my Lord and Savior!!!!

I pray that each day of your life is transformed by God’s grace. Sometimes it is easy to live discouraged, defeated Christian lives because we do not fix our eyes on Jesus and instead focus on our sin or on our problems. If we would but focus our hearts upon Jesus we would be amazed by the joy that will overflow from our lives. He is the spring that alone can satisfy our hearts…so let us come to Him and be satisfied. Let us come to our LIVING HOPE.

Destroying Our Idols~ #1 Dust Cannot Lie

God has greatly challenged me the past several months to examine my life to see what idols I have set up in my heart. I do not often think of myself as a person who serves idols (that is something that people in the old testament did, not me!), but by God’s grace He has showed me how entrapped I am by the idols in my life. My heart is grieved and filled with such anguish as I stop and see how I actually live and act and invest my time and thoughts; I am no different than the children of Israel when they were in the wilderness, continually wandering away from the one who had rescued them from slavery.


So in the next several blog posts, I want to share with you what God has been teaching me about destroying my idols. I pray that you are convicted of sin and challenged to examine your own life and destroy any and all idols that you may have set up in your own heart.

To begin, I want to first challenge you to dig into God’s Word. Dust cannot lie. How desperately terrible it is when we who call ourselves followers of Christ can write Jesus’ name in the dust that collects on our Bibles. Jesus engraved our names in the palms of His hands by the shedding of His precious blood. He suffered and endured God’s wrath for our sin. He has given us such amazing grace, and in return for His kindness we offer Him a pile of dust that we have allowed to collect on His Word. Instead of investing ourselves knowing God and spending our lives glorifying His awesome name, we serve our idols. We do not want to serve the Jesus of the Bible (of course we would never say those words!). If we actually read our Bibles I think we would come face to face with the fact that the Jesus in the Bible is too dangerous, uncomfortable, unsafe, radical, challenging, and serious for our “Christianized American Dream”. Sure we want to follow Christ---we want to go to heaven---but we do not want to actually take up our instruments of death and follow Him down a narrow, unpopular, and lonely road. We do not want to die to self and give up the things we enjoy on this earth. We would rather linger in the rays of the sun than tremble in joyful awe before the throne of God; we would rather get married and enjoy our dreams than live radically for the one whose love for us was so radical that He endured our hell so we can be with Him; and we would rather live for this world than run hard for eternity.

Jesus must be our treasure and nothing else in this life. If this is not true than we are not true followers of Christ and we are on our way to Hell. Christ demands complete obedience, 100% commitment, and total dedication. There is no such thing as half-hearted Christians; those who consider themselves as such are not Christians at all.

So we must know Jesus and treasure Him with all of our hearts, and to do this we must look into God’s Word and see Him for who He really is---the Almighty Son of God, who is the Creator and sustainer of all things; who made Himself nothing and humbled Himself to the point of death; who drank the Father’s wrath and made atonement for sin; who was raised from the dead on the third day and is exalted at the right hand of God; and who is standing always to make intercession for His own. However, most of us do not look into God’s Word to see who Jesus is, but instead we pear into our mirrors and fashion a Jesus who looks like us, talks like us, thinks like us, and lives like us. So we make Jesus into something He is not but something we can handle and wrap our minds around. Instead of remembering that we were made in God’s image, we want to serve a god who is made in our own image. This is idolatry! Dear Brothers and Sisters if you examine this “Jesus” we have made, we are not worshipping the Lord God, but we are really worshipping ourselves.


O Lovers of Christ, may your hearts be broken as mine is, and may you be filled with great sorrow over your sin. Let us repent and turn back to the Living God, and let us serve Him with all of our hearts.

Let us destroy our idols!

Sara-Grace Waite
Yorktown, VA
May 6, 2011

A Sobering Reflection

“For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable.”

--

Hebrews 4:12-13

I know life can be very busy at times, but I would beg you to stop for a few moments and take a trip with me today. Trust me, where we are going is not easy, and what we must do when we get there and all along the way is even harder; but be assured, that if you do not take time to come with me now, your soul shall be in very grave danger. So let us go and search the depths of our hearts and souls, and let us cast down our idols and turn wholeheartedly to serving the Living God.



Perhaps you have never seen Bible churches in the United States filled with idols, or Christian homes adorned by false gods, but I have; and what grieves me most is that I am among them. We are people who do not treasure Jesus. We want to make Him fit our needs and our lifestyles so we distort the Truth and exchange it for a lie. We like serving a God of love, we enjoy going to a church with comfortable chairs, good music, and inspirational messages. We need our weekly pep talk, so we come and joke around and fulfill our spiritual duty; but we are not serving Jesus; we are worshipping ourselves.



Awake, O Church, and see that we have erected idols in our hearts: idols of comfort, security, ambition, family, retirement, money, greatness, fame, and so much more. The Word of God means so very little to us and we can see this proven true in the time we invest in it. O God, break our hearts! We have sinned and traded you for the gifts you bestow, for the glory that is your due, and for the trappings of this world. And dare we think that we serve the Living God when we neither put Him first in our lives nor seek Him above all things.



I speak from experience, we gather on Sundays bringing some of our idols with us. There are plenty of other idols of course waiting for us once we arrive at church. We check our face book and email before the service starts, check the clock and figure out how much longer until lunch, eat some snacks and drink a cup of coffee, complain about the weather, talk about sports, and then find our seats before the service starts. Like a movie theater we pick the best place to sit, sink into our comfortable chairs, we pop our knuckles while the announcements are being made, we sing, we pray, we listen or at least try to as we catch ourselves daydreaming about life and the new week ahead of us. We say goodbye, not really remembering what the message was about, but ready to get on with life and get back to what really matters. And that would be a typical morning church service for many people in the United States, including myself.



But I am left empty and haunted by questions: where are the tears, the sorrow for sin, the soul felt worship, the desperate cries for help and strength, the joy in singing to the Living God, the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our midst---where is God? Have we not come to worship Him on His glorious throne? But I do not see Him here; I do not feel His power and presence. However, I do see a throne and seated on the throne is a mirror, and I see myself bowing down before that mirror, investing time and energy appeasing it. I also see upon the throne my laptop with my facebook account open along with my email account and google searches…a reminder of my time spent. I see comfort and security, I see ambition and pride, I see fame and self-recognition, and I see dreams and lusts all piled high upon the throne and still do I wonder where my Lord has gone?



I have not come to church to worship the Living God, but to be entertained; I have not come to humbly bow before the Almighty Creator, but to satisfy my own “felt needs”; I have not come to exalt God, but to glorify myself. How can you tell me that we do not bow down to idols in this country when they are all around us; and every whisper from the world and countless “so called Christians” is to come along with them in their idolatry? Mirrors, facebook, email, food, weather, sports, goals, dreams, etc. are not bad; but neither is wood, gold, bronze, clay, and stones. However when we put them in God’s place and treasure them above our Almighty Savior then we have set them up as idols that we bow down to.



O Lovers of Christ, repent with me, and let us turn from our wicked ways! Let us return to the Savior of our souls, casting down our idols, which are worthless.



O hear this battle cry, all you Soldiers of the Lord! Turn off your TVs, turn off the radio, put your computers away, turn off your cellphones, and open the Word of God. We wonder why God’s Word is not powerful in our lives (as it sits collecting dust on the shelf!), we wonder why we feel so empty (as we fill our lives with empty pursuits!), and we wonder why the God of the Bible seems so different then the God we serve (as we do not even know the God of the Bible!).



If everything was stripped away, would Christ be enough? If all you had to look forward to on Sundays was to study the Bible, would you come? Jesus demands everything from us…if we are to be true followers of Christ we must deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Him. This means dying to self-daily, and putting to death all our fleshly longings and desires. We must give up everything to follow after Jesus. His Word is our life! If this kind of discipleship is not your idea of Christianity then you are not a follower of Christ, and you are going to Hell where you will bear God’s wrath for your sin.



The battle is fierce, but by God’s grace I will fight, and by the power of His Holy Spirit, I beg Him to enable me to cast down the idols I serve and instead cling to the Living God who alone reigns supreme. I have no power in myself, I have no ability to serve God, I am nothing, I am a sinner saved by grace and I stand clothed in Christ’s righteousness. He is my beauty, my all, my treasure, and my joy. Battle, O Faithful Ones, for the faith that has been entrusted to you! Battle with all your might in the power of God!



You will find strength and help in the Word of the Living God, but you must read it and invest your life in knowing Jesus. The Word of God is living and sharper than a two edged sword. Do not come to it as any other book, but as the very Words of God given to us because that is exactly what it is.



Thrust down the idols that are set up in your heart and life and come to God’s Word and be transformed as you renew your minds. Bow in prayer to the Living God and cry out to Him to work in your life and to empower you by the Holy Spirit to live for His glory alone. Persevere in these disciplines and do not give up, but wait upon the Lord and hope in Him. He sees our hearts, and our motives are laid bare before Him. Let us repent, and live wholeheartedly for Jesus.